An exposure draft of family law amendments released by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus aims to put children’s welfare at the heart of legal decisions by replacing complex factors judges need to consider with streamlined principles surrounding the child’s best interests.
“These long overdue proposed reforms replace the often confusing law around parenting arrangements with a simpler child-focused framework that will guide parents who can agree on their own post-separation parenting arrangements,” Dreyfus said of the proposed reforms.
Courts will be given a new power to restrain someone from persistently filing family law applications against a partner if it is likely to cause them harm.
Once this order is in place,further applications would first be assessed to ensure that they are not “vexatious,frivolous or an abuse of proceedings”.
Full Stop Australia advocacy manager Angela Lynch said the organisation supported the measure,but added that more needed to be done to protect victims of family violence from litigation and legal system abuse.
Lynch said one further measure would be to enable the Family Court to identify cases at an early stage where a party was likely to manipulate the system.
Griffith University law school senior lecturer Zoe Rathus said removing the presumption of equal parenting was the “absolute key” in the announced reforms due to a long-running misunderstanding that parents involved in litigation were owed equal time with their children.